Tuesday, January 26, 2016

The city still hasn't plowed many streets in our area

Today I was walking around north of DCUSA and noticed that almost none of the streets had been plowed between 14th and 16th Streets: we already heard about Newton, but the same thing is afoot on Parkwood, Otis, Oak and Meridian, as well as the 1300 block of Otis.

I've been reporting them to the city via 311 and also emailing Councilmember Nadeau, but this is crazy. It's been three days and most of the main streets are already clear, where are the plows for the rest? It's been days.

I just had a brief walk, but from the cool interactive plow map that Mapbox's Tom Lee made, it looks like the city has skipped all or part of a lot of other residential streets between Columbia and Spring Road east of 13th: Quebec, Princeton, Otis, Newton, Morton, Lamont, and Keefer and 10th and 11th between Spring and Monroe. Farther south, parts of Gresham, Girard, Fairmont, Hobart, Chapin, and University are also unplowed. (On that map, the street color means how recently the street has been plowed: white means within the last hour, red is a while ago, and gray is not at all. So gray is bad.)

DCist reports that the city brought in contractors that aren't included in the map, but from my walk at least, those places weren't plowed at all, by anybody. That stinks.

And even some streets that are partially plowed are not in great shape: Spring Road, for example, has only one lane clear, but it's a two way street, and today two fire trucks heading east were stopped by a minivan heading west. For some reason the minivan driver didn't back up for a good five minutes while the fire trucks blew their horns and played their sirens, until finally one of the firefighters came over and told them to back up, so this can be a safety concern. The fire trucks ended up on 13th Street, which wasn't plowed at all.

It's a mess. The city needs more plows or better planning or something.

UPDATE: The city has apparently now plowed the streets between 14th and 13th, but between 14th and 16th still hasn't been, as well as most the residential streets in Park View.